I’m very square, and bewildered by all these euphemisms

George Alan Rekers, the anti-gay gay minister, has actually come out and admitted what he and his lovely rent-boy were doing on tour.

If you talk with my travel assistant that the story called “Lucien,” you will find I spent a great deal of time sharing scientific information on the desirability of abandoning homosexual intercourse, and I shared the Gospel of Jesus Christ with him in great detail.

Now I’m worried. I just know I’m going to go into class to “share scientific information”, and all the knowing gays will be giggling and laughing and saying, “oh, he went there,” and I’ll be baffled about what the joke is.

At least there’s no risk that I’ll “share the Gospel of Jesus Christ.” I can only imagine how pornographic that is.

The poor man. With all that “luggage lifting” and “sharing scientific information” and “gospel swapping,” he must be totally “fagged out”.

A church is a gaping hole cut into a community’s resources

Chicago has been oppressing the people! They’ve installed some mechanical deviltry called parking meters on the street, forcing people who want to drive their multiton iron chariots (an offense unto god right there) into the city and then park them somewhere to pay for the privilege. Everyone is annoyed by parking meters, but guess who is whining the loudest? The churches, of course.

“I think it’s interfering with my religious activity,” said the Rev. Webb Evans, 96, who keeps an office at Israel Methodist Community Church. “We should have the freedom to go to church without having to pay a meter five or six feet in front of the door.”

Yes? And others should be free to go into a bar without paying a meter. Or into a restaurant. Or into a store. Those at least bring some economic gain into a community. But churches? They already get to squat on valuable property without paying taxes, and now they want the city to subsidize the parking of their flocks? What they’re really complaining about is that the city is fleecing the flock a little bit before the priests can get their hands in their pockets.

And this is hilarious:

“We’re not asking for special privileges,” said the Rev. Philip Blackwell, pastor of First United Methodist Church at Chicago Temple. “We just happen to be religious institutions.”

No, special privileges is precisely what they are asking for: they are insisting that the activity of their precious institution is more valuable or more worthy than that of other businesses and residences in the area, and want a special dispensation so their clientele can use a public resource for free.

I say, charge ’em extra.

I have a special antipathy to this kind of demand from churches. I grew up in a neighborhood where our house was sandwiched between two churches, the Catholic and the Lutheran. We were afflicted constantly by the Lutheran church’s insistence on playing hymns on one of those ghastly electronic carillons every hour and half hour…and since we were right across the street and they played them LOUD, all conversation, music, and TV in our house got regularly drowned out. And then on Sundays, the neighborhood would be choked with cars parked everywhere.

(Which we turned into a bonus, actually: it was amazing how many people would come out of a church service with bills stuffed into their pockets, which would spill unnoticed onto the ground when they pulled out their car keys. We kids would head out right after services to cruise the empty parking spaces, looking for loot.)

Another gripe is that the churches turned our town into a wasteland. Parking was such an issue that they bought up whole blocks, razed everything on them, and paved them over…including my childhood home. If you’re ever in Kent, Washington, go to the corner of 2nd and Titus streets where I lived, and behold what was once a lively neighborhood, now a desert of asphalt — my house was on the northeast corner of what is now the Catholic church’s parking lot. Don’t go on the hour, unless you’re really fond of “Onward Christian Soldiers.”

And there was much rejoicing!

A deal has been struck to import Gudeløs into the US. This is good stuff; I’ve had one bottle of it, and was looking forward to tapping the source in Denmark, and now it looks like I may be able to get it more regularly.

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Devil’s Brew and the Danish Atheist Society have entered into an unholy alliance, and the result is ‘Godless’ – an ale brewed entirely without superstition. [Godless] is an imperial stout with burnt and sweetish impressions, together with notes of licorice. To exercise social responsibility, Devil’s Brew donates one Danish Crown to the Danish Atheist Society for each bottle sold.

Wait…all beers are godless. There are no Christian beers, Muslim beers, Hindu beers, and to so label them is beer abuse.

Fashionably freaky?

I don’t know if I should even mention this. It’s a cowhide vest up for bids on ebay. It’s a pedestrian bit of trash, except…it’s made by Ray Comfort, and is even signed by him. That makes it freakish and weird, and kind of a trophy to wear.

It’s for a woman, size 6-8. I suppose you could get it for your Mom for Mother’s Day, or maybe you would just want to wear it for yourself. It could be a conversation starter, if nothing else. Most of the money from the auction goes to the Foundation Beyond Belief, so it’s also in a good cause.

It’s just weird.

Poll: Should comedians be rude?

Catherine Deveny seems to have hit a nerve. She made a remark about a child star over twitter — “I do so hope Bindi Irwin gets laid” — which triggered the “Think of the children!” reflex and got her fired from her job writing for the Melbourne Age newspaper.

This subject might be a bit contentious, since people are already wrangling over it in the endless thread. I’m going to have to side with the people who say it was out of line, it was incredibly rude, and…it’s exactly what a comedian should be doing, pushing the boundaries and making people uncomfortable. I felt a bit torn when I read it, too, but this was at an awards show, where women (and in this case, a girl) are tarted up and expected to parade about in fancy fashion in a role that the men are not. It was a very edgy remark since it made the sexualization of an 11 year old blatant, but that was the point!

And it got Deveny fired. I guess The Age wanted a bland, safe, unchallenging comedian.

I am wondering, though, how a comedian can be fired, but Cardinal Pell gets to keep his job. If Australians were so concerned about Protecting The Children, shouldn’t the old idjit been kicked out of the country long ago? Maybe it’s because he wasn’t even trying to be funny.

Anyway, there’s a poll. I don’t expect it to get pharyngulated in the usual way, since the godless vote will be split.

Were Catherine Deveny’s Logies Tweets out of line?

Yes, she picked on a little girl

60%
No, that’s her style of humour

40%

Advocates advocate against advocacy

The advocates of accommodationism and apologetics at Biologos have a new article up claiming that scientists ought not to advocate for science — we’re supposed to emphasize uncertainty. That’s lame; it feeds into the sterile stereotype of the scientist as some kind of dispassionate drone with little enthusiasm for ideas. As Jerry Coyne explains, it’s also hypocritical of a site that promotes religion without hesitation to be arguing that scientists should be more ambiguous.

That’s all we need, is for science to be made more boring, dry, and ambiguous. You’d almost think the Templetonites over there want to sabotage science education.

Christopher Maloney is still a QUACK!

He’s still complaining. Maloney is the naturopath in Maine who makes inflated claims about the efficacy of his magic drugs, and who still pops by here and now then to protest feebly, and he’s still making stuff up elsewhere. It also turns out that he has a page warning the world about me and you readers.

The infamous PZ Myers asked those who visit his blog to repeat this message all over the internet. He chose me because of false accusations from a local freshman, who blamed me for getting his insipid little clone blog kicked off the internet. Since Myers runs a thing called the endless thread, the majority of his popularity is manufactured by random postings. But multiple clone sites attach themselves to his and we have a flotilla of clones masquerading as independent thinkers.

When PZ Myers was questioned, he eventually retracted his original accusations, but his clone sites did not. I have spent considerable time answering questions at both PZ Myers site and Dr. Novella’s sister site. Dr. Novella acts as the “brain trust” and “spanks” anyone who questions PZ Myers.

Whoa. You can manufacture popularity with random postings? Why hasn’t everyone leapt upon this tactic? He also seems to like the terms “clone blog” and “clone site” to refer to anyone on the web who has noticed that Christopher Maloney is a quack.

By the way, I did not retract anything I said about him: he is a quack. Steve Novella is not my servant; I’m sure he’d laugh at the idea that he supports me unquestioningly. Novella dropped the evidence bomb on Maloney, nothing more.

Maloney has also given the Pharyngula gang an entry in his main menu. Are you flattered? He claims there that I have moderated him out of existence. He has not been banned in any way, however; his evidence is that he includes a copy of a comment that did not get posted. It has five links in it. Hmmm…I guess I must have targeted that one for deletion because it was so persuasive. The fact that we have filtering software that screens comments for excessive links is irrelevant.

Oh, well, I guess I’ll just have to be kind and reply by boosting Maloney’s reputation on Google as a quack a little more.

That’s no universe!

Stephen Wolfram has mastered the art of being intellectually provocative and extremely annoying at the same time. He’s talking about very cool stuff here, but I’m put off by the excessive hype — apparently he wants to model the fundamental properties of the entire universe in some code in the computer, and while I sympathize with the idea that maybe the theory of everything really will lead to something both fundamental and simple, I’m not convinced that it will just pop out of a program that is sufficiently synthetic.

Perhaps it would be more persuasive if he said something more specific than waving a hand at a squiggly diagram of a 3-dimensional set of looping lines on the computer screen and announcing that that there was our universe.